The poverty-stricken world of North Korea

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An army of labourers, rugged up against the cold, work on a World Food Program project to restore a salt plain.Picture:AFP

As North Korea haggles over rejoining talks about its nuclear weapons, Hamish McDonald reports from Pyongyang on its defiant but exhausted people.

Guiding a carload of tourists into Panmunjom, the bizarre village for truce talks in the middle of the tense frontier that is the Korean demilitarised zone, a North Korean army colonel was dismissive of the US victory in Iraq, which he had watched closely on television.

"It was just a kids' game," he said last week, as the car crossed the North's defensive embankment with its tank barriers and electrified fences into the four-kilometre-wide DMZ.

"Even though Iraq had some modern weapons, they were not single-hearted, they were not Saddam-centred, and many of their high officials were bribed by the United States."

Asked if he had been impressed by America's use of precision missiles, night-visibility goggles and satellite-based targeting, compared to the decade-old Russian equipment that is the best in North Korea's arsenal, the colonel insisted: "You cannot understand the spirit of the People's Army soldier."

He looked down on the demarcation line dividing Panmunjom where, just a few metres away, People's Army guards were eyeballing their South Korean counterparts, who were wearing sunglasses and standing in a clenched-fist Taekwondo posture. "They are wearing sunglasses because they cannot stand the fierce gaze of our soldiers," he said.

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But the colonel had a question of his own that may have betrayed a certain edginess. "Do you think there will be a war here?" he asked.

How much longer the North Koreans can keep up their formidable conventional forces is one of the big but unanswerable questions surrounding the security crisis that broke out when the Pyongyang Government's covert nuclear weapons activity was revealed a year ago.

The answer would reveal how much is invested in nuclear weapons, and how easily they could be given up by "the Great Leader", Kim Jong-il, the 61-year-old who inherited the regime on the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, in 1994.

In Pyongyang, the capital . . . the people are noticeably better fed and dressed than those in the countryside.

To the few ordinary foreign visitors, the strain is all too evident. Apart from a few sputtering Chinese and Russian jeeps, military traffic is absent from North Korean roads. Soldiers hitch rides on passing trucks. Though poised in attack positions facing South Korea, the army is static, carefully husbanding limited stocks of fuel, food and war material.

The economic and human support for the 1.1 million-strong military visibly crumbled with the end of Soviet aid in the early 1990s, followed by floods that devastated 15 per cent of the arable land, flooded coal mines and wrecked power grids, leading to a famine that killed up to two million people and is still recalled in persistent stories of cannibalism.

When the four times-weekly train crosses the Yalu River from the Chinese city of Dandong to the North Korean entry port of Sinuiju, it is a kilometre trundle but a time-warp of decades.

From the train children can be seen helping cut the last of the rice harvest with sickles. Carts drawn by horses, bullocks and men carry the burdens. Old men and women forage on hillsides for edible plants. Others glean in harvested fields for dropped heads of grain. Men pan for gold in a stream.

Derelict workshops, abandoned machinery, battered rolling stock and old locomotives can be seen along the railway. In the train's soft-class carriages, senior cadres in Western suits mingle warily with foreign passengers - their colour-coded Kim Il-sung lapel badges showing they belong to the higher levels of a 54-grade political status ranking.

Gazing out at the thin yields of rice and corn and desultory activity, one cadre dismissed suggestions that the food supply might be getting better. "You think so?" he asked derisively. "The life of the ordinary people is very difficult. They have to eat what is not natural for people to eat."

At the big Shinanju station, midway to Pyongyang, the results of nearly 20 years of food shortages are plain to see - groups of stunted young army conscripts who barely make the 1.3 metre minimum height requirement of the People's Army.

In Pyongyang, the capital, with broad empty streets mostly unlit at night and shabby apartment blocks glimmering dimly with low-wattage lights, the people are noticeably better fed and dressed than those in the countryside.

On one side of central Kim Il-Sung Square, the building housing the economic ministries carries the emblem of the Korean Worker's Party, along with portraits of Marx and Lenin. Mid-last year, Mr Kim belatedly launched his country into a tentative version of China's 1978 market reforms, raising salaries and prices, allowing small markets to open, and drastically devaluing the currency.

The result has been a gradual introduction of a cash economy to a previously ration and quota-based system. But production has not noticeably responded except perhaps in the numerous small vegetable plots around apartment blocks and workplaces.

Somehow, trade with China is expanding, with North Korea's imports from its neighbour surging 22 per cent in the first six months of the year to 594 million won ($A383 million) mostly for oil. How it is paid for, when North Korea exported only 237 million won back in the same period, is a mystery - unless China is extending endless credit or Pyongyang is using some of the 1100 million won or so it earns annually from its export mainstay, ballistic missiles to the Middle East.

Advertising is absent around Pyongyang, save for political slogans and billboards, many showing US forces skewered on People's Army bayonets. Patriotic songs in the style of the Soviet Red Army Choir blare from loudspeakers. Even on the escalators down to the city's Moscow-style underground railway, political commentaries squawk at commuters: "We must safeguard the leadership of Comrade Kim Jong-il!"

The only other colour comes from portraits of Mr Kim and his father and illuminated monuments like the 170-metre tower topped by a flickering red electric torch erected to commemorate Kim senior's Juche (self-sufficiency) version of Marxism-Leninism, which has been transmuted by his son into a personal or familial cult called Kimilsungism.

That the cult of a dead dictator (now known as "The Eternal Leader") continues to wield so much sway over the mind of North Korea is testimony to the regime's propaganda apparatus, the isolation it imposes on the country, and a national psyche still traumatised by Japan's 1907-1945 occupation and the brutal 1950-53 Korean War.